Robert Anton Wilson fans: there's a stage version of his autobiography Cosmic Trigger coming, from the daughter of Ken Campbell (who produced the stage version of Illuminatus! in the 70's). A preview of this (including original video of Alan Moore on the subject of Wilson) happened last Sunday in Liverpool. It involved the bust of CG Jung and a pair of rainbow-coloured knickers. I was there - here's the write-up.

The Bitcoin demographic is 98% male, between the ages of 20-30. I base this on official online polls, confirmed by pictures of the Bitcoin Christmas party at Bitcoin HQ in NYC, which somehow managed to look more depressing than my high-school dances. This demographic uses their laptops for viewing highly questionable content and their phones for installing flapping bird software from Jimmy Bob's Software Inc. These are the same people who have started but not yet finished reading The Fountainhead, the same people who grant permissions to make phone calls, activate cameras and send SMSs to phone apps whose sole function is to act as a flashlight. Running a wallet is the last thing they should be trusted with. [...] What Nigerian scams are to your grandfather, Bitcoin exchanges are to the 20-30 semi-tech-savvy libertarian demographic.

The concept of the long tail seemed like a useful way of understanding how consumers interact with content in digital contexts, and for a while looked like the roadmap for an exciting era of digital content. Intuitively the democratization of access to music – both on the supply and demand sides – coupled with vastness of digital music catalogues should have translated into a dilution of the Superstar economy effect. Instead the marketplace has shown us that humans are just as much wandering sheep in need of herding online as they are offline.

I've been waiting for the long tail effect to really start kicking in as the millennium has progressed, but it just seems that it's not happening the way that it was predicted. We have the superstars and then we have the seething mass of other artists getting less and less.

I added my comments from the post I got this from, because it may or may not be interesting to y'all.

tl;dr - This is super exciting, the world needs more of this, and if I can manage I'll order the $25 version. (Or ask for it for my birthday?)

Growing up, my sense of what my body should look like was definitely influenced by my barbie dolls, and I'd love to see a line of dolls like that with multiple proportions and ethnicities (and hair!!) I've observed that there are three main groupings of dolls being bought: the Princess dolls, Monster High, and My Little Pony (movie version), which doesn't surprise me. The typical Barbie doll is mind bogglingly outdated and doesn't even have great outfits (yes I go through the toy isle to check up on such things). I'd also like to see female action figures being sold in the "boys" area, which probably won't happen, but I can dream, right? Anyway, I could easily talk for hours about this kind of stuff, and if I had the money, I'd probably collect fashion dolls and action figures.

The missing plane's Rolls Royce engines sent telemetry suggesting they were running for hours after the last RADAR sighting.

The investigation remains fluid, and it isn't clear whether investigators have evidence indicating possible terrorism or sabotage. So far, U.S. national security officials have said that nothing specifically points toward terrorism, though they haven't ruled it out.But the huge uncertainty about where the plane was headed, and why it apparently continued flying so long without working transponders, has raised theories among investigators that the aircraft may have been commandeered for a reason that appears unclear to U.S. authorities. Some of those theories have been laid out to national security officials and senior personnel from various U.S. agencies, according to one person familiar with the matter.At one briefing, according to this person, officials were told investigators are actively pursuing the notion that the plane was diverted "with the intention of using it later for another purpose."

I'd be willing to bet a good sum of money that there's been some sort of rare, catastrophic failure mid-flight, and that the airplane - which in the end is a thin tube of aluminium foil - is in small pieces across a large area of the sea.